Download or read book Understanding America s Greatest Existential Threats written by Dr. J. R. Maxwell and published by FriesenPress. This book was released on 2020-12-08 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this introductory volume, readers will learn about the vital role that the various Critical Infrastructure (CI) sectors play in America, in the context of homeland security. The protection, maintenance, and monitoring of these interdependent CI assets is a shared responsibility of governments, private sector owner/operators, first responders, and all those involved in homeland security and emergency management. As this foundational learning resource demonstrates, rapidly advancing technologies combined with exponential growth in demand on the aging infrastructure of America’s power grid is setting the stage for a potentially catastrophic collapse that would paralyze each and every facet of civilian life and military operations. This meticulously researched primer will guide readers through the known world of power failures and cyber-attacks to the emerging threat from a High-altitude Electromagnetic Pulse (HEMP). A HEMP would cause cascading failures in the power grid, communications, water treatment facilities, oil refineries, pipelines, banking, supply chain management, food production, air traffic control, and all forms of transportation. Each chapter in America’s Greatest Existential Threat (Vol. 1) begins with learning objectives and ends with a series of review questions to assess take-up of the chapter material. Similarly, subsequent volumes will explore HEMP and emerging issues in closer detail with current research and analysis now in development.
Download or read book Understanding America s Greatest Existential Threats written by J. R. Maxwell and published by . This book was released on 2020-11-18 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this introductory volume, readers will learn about the vital role that the various Critical Infrastructure (CI) sectors play in America, in the context of homeland security. The protection, maintenance, and monitoring of these interdependent CI assets is a shared responsibility of governments, private sector owner/operators, first responders, and all those involved in homeland security and emergency management. As this foundational learning resource demonstrates, rapidly advancing technologies combined with exponential growth in demand on the aging infrastructure of America's power grid is setting the stage for a potentially catastrophic collapse that would paralyze each and every facet of civilian life and military operations. This meticulously researched primer will guide readers through the known world of power failures and cyber-attacks to the emerging threat from a High-altitude Electromagnetic Pulse (HEMP). A HEMP would cause cascading failures in the power grid, communications, water treatment facilities, oil refineries, pipelines, banking, supply chain management, food production, air traffic control, and all forms of transportation. Each chapter in America's Greatest Existential Threat (Vol. 1) begins with learning objectives and ends with a series of review questions to assess take-up of the chapter material. Similarly, subsequent volumes will explore HEMP and emerging issues in closer detail with current research and analysis now in development....
Download or read book Existential Threats written by Lisa Vox and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2017-07-03 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book the author assembles a wide range of media—science fiction movies, biblical tractates, rapture fiction—to develop a critical history of the apocalyptic imagination from the late 1800s to the present.--Publisher's description.
Download or read book The Next Step written by and published by Bbva-Open Mind. This book was released on 2017-03 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Next Step: Exponential Life presents essays on the potential of what are known as "exponential technologies"--those whose development is accelerating rapidly, such as robotics, artificial intelligence or industrial biology--considering their economic, social, environmental, ethical and even ontological implications. This book's premise is that humanity is at the beginning of a technological revolution that is evolving at a much faster pace than earlier ones--a revolution is so far-reaching it is destined to generate transformations we can only begin to imagine. Contributors include Aubrey D.N.J. de Grey, Jonathan Rossiter, Joseph A. Paradiso, Kevin Warwick, Huma Shah, Ramón López de Mántaras, Helen Papagiannis, Jay David Bolter, Maria Engberg, Robin Hanson, Stuart Russell, Darrell M. West, Francisco González, Chris Skinner, Steven Monroe Lipkin, S. Matthew Liao, James Giordano, Luciano Floridi, Seán Ó Héigeartaigh and Martin Rees.
Download or read book The Precipice written by Toby Ord and published by Hachette Books. This book was released on 2020-03-24 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This urgent and eye-opening book makes the case that protecting humanity's future is the central challenge of our time. If all goes well, human history is just beginning. Our species could survive for billions of years - enough time to end disease, poverty, and injustice, and to flourish in ways unimaginable today. But this vast future is at risk. With the advent of nuclear weapons, humanity entered a new age, where we face existential catastrophes - those from which we could never come back. Since then, these dangers have only multiplied, from climate change to engineered pathogens and artificial intelligence. If we do not act fast to reach a place of safety, it will soon be too late. Drawing on over a decade of research, The Precipice explores the cutting-edge science behind the risks we face. It puts them in the context of the greater story of humanity: showing how ending these risks is among the most pressing moral issues of our time. And it points the way forward, to the actions and strategies that can safeguard humanity. An Oxford philosopher committed to putting ideas into action, Toby Ord has advised the US National Intelligence Council, the UK Prime Minister's Office, and the World Bank on the biggest questions facing humanity. In The Precipice, he offers a startling reassessment of human history, the future we are failing to protect, and the steps we must take to ensure that our generation is not the last. "A book that seems made for the present moment." —New Yorker
Download or read book World Without Mind written by Franklin Foer and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2017-09-12 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 2017 • One of the best books of the year by The New York Times, LA Times, and NPR Franklin Foer reveals the existential threat posed by big tech, and in his brilliant polemic gives us the toolkit to fight their pervasive influence. Over the past few decades there has been a revolution in terms of who controls knowledge and information. This rapid change has imperiled the way we think. Without pausing to consider the cost, the world has rushed to embrace the products and services of four titanic corporations. We shop with Amazon; socialize on Facebook; turn to Apple for entertainment; and rely on Google for information. These firms sell their efficiency and purport to make the world a better place, but what they have done instead is to enable an intoxicating level of daily convenience. As these companies have expanded, marketing themselves as champions of individuality and pluralism, their algorithms have pressed us into conformity and laid waste to privacy. They have produced an unstable and narrow culture of misinformation, and put us on a path to a world without private contemplation, autonomous thought, or solitary introspection—a world without mind. In order to restore our inner lives, we must avoid being coopted by these gigantic companies, and understand the ideas that underpin their success. Elegantly tracing the intellectual history of computer science—from Descartes and the enlightenment to Alan Turing to Stewart Brand and the hippie origins of today's Silicon Valley—Foer exposes the dark underpinnings of our most idealistic dreams for technology. The corporate ambitions of Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon, he argues, are trampling longstanding liberal values, especially intellectual property and privacy. This is a nascent stage in the total automation and homogenization of social, political, and intellectual life. By reclaiming our private authority over how we intellectually engage with the world, we have the power to stem the tide. At stake is nothing less than who we are, and what we will become. There have been monopolists in the past but today's corporate giants have far more nefarious aims. They’re monopolists who want access to every facet of our identities and influence over every corner of our decision-making. Until now few have grasped the sheer scale of the threat. Foer explains not just the looming existential crisis but the imperative of resistance.
Download or read book Understanding American COVID 19 Pandemic Beliefs Behaviors Politics and Society written by Herbert C. Covey and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2023-11-02 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Understanding American COVID-19 Pandemic Beliefs, Behaviors, Politics, and Society, Herbert C. Covey presents an overview of how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted American society. He proposes that the social and political contexts leading up to and during the pandemic fueled differing and sometimes opposing attitudes and behaviors. Some Americans saw COVID-19 as a dangerous threat while others dismissed it as overblown. Covey observes that these divergent views occurred in a vacuum but were influenced by various political, historical, cultural, psychological, and social factors. He argues that Americans’ social perceptions of the pandemic were affected by the unpredictability of the virus, erosion of trust in science and institutions, degradation of the news by biased news sources and social media, loss of critical thinking skills, denialism, truth decay, high emotions, racism, and unprecedented politicization of the pandemic. In addition, the susceptibility of some Americans to COVID-19 rumors, myths, misinformation, and conspiracies led them to make poor health decisions resulting in more severe cases of COVID-19 or, in some cases, death. The book includes data from numerous national surveys to document American beliefs and behaviors related to the pandemic. Finally, the author shows how these beliefs have led to protests, conspiracies, and social movements regarding pandemic responses.
Download or read book Morality Foresight and Human Flourishing written by Phil Torres and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Existential risk studies is a growing field that attempts to understand the greatest dangers to humanity from a scientific perspective. This book offers the first scholarly survey of existential risks, from asteroid impacts and climate change to molecular nanotechnology and machine superintelligence. It argues that avoiding an existential catastrophe should be among our highest moral priorities and analyzes a number of risk mitigation strategies to reduce the probability of a worst-case scenario. The dangers facing humanity this century are real and immense, but the future course of civilization is ultimately up to us.
Download or read book X Risk written by Thomas Moynihan and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2020-11-03 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How humanity came to contemplate its possible extinction. From forecasts of disastrous climate change to prophecies of evil AI superintelligences and the impending perils of genome editing, our species is increasingly concerned with the prospects of its own extinction. With humanity's future on this planet seeming more insecure by the day, in the twenty-first century, existential risk has become the object of a growing field of serious scientific inquiry. But, as Thomas Moynihan shows in X-Risk, this preoccupation is not exclusive to the post-atomic age of global warming and synthetic biology. Our growing concern with human extinction itself has a history. Tracing this untold story, Moynihan revisits the pioneers who first contemplated the possibility of human extinction and stages the historical drama of this momentous discovery. He shows how, far from being a secular reprise of religious prophecies of apocalypse, existential risk is a thoroughly modern idea, made possible by the burgeoning sciences and philosophical tumult of the Enlightenment era. In recollecting how we first came to care for our extinction, Moynihan reveals how today's attempts to measure and mitigate existential threats are the continuation of a project initiated over two centuries ago, which concerns the very vocation of the human as a rational, responsible, and future-oriented being.
Download or read book The Arab Lobby and the US written by Dania Koleilat Khatib and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-10-23 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: All the components needed to construct an Arab lobby exist; the significant Arab Diaspora in the US, the historic strategic relationship between Arab Gulf States and the US, and the Gulf’s economic wealth. However, lobbying is alien to Arab culture and largely absent from its political landscape. To achieve a fair and objective assessment of Arab Gulf lobbying it is necessary to have a thorough understanding of the prevailing Arab Gulf political culture that shapes it. The Arab Lobby and the US provides a timely contribution to this understanding. Studying attempts by Arab Gulf states to effectively lobby the US government, it explores aspects of their lobbying behaviour in order to identify the factors that lead to success and those that lead to failure from their lobbying endeavours. In this respect, the research utilizes two case studies: one in which Arab Gulf state lobbying was successful, and another in which lobbying failed. In tandem with an analysis of the strategies—or lack of them—behind Arab Gulf states’ lobbying, the research examines additional relevant factors such as the organization and activism of the US Arab American community, the strategic value of the Arab Gulf to the US, and the negative image of Arabs in America. The book considers the obstacles to the establishment of an effective Arab Gulf lobby in the US in order to reach an informed conclusion that evaluates the prospects of an effective Arab Gulf lobby. As one of the few academic research works on the Arab Lobby, this work will be of value to scholars and policy makers interested in US domestic politics and Arab American activism, as well as students of Middle Eastern Studies, Arab Gulf studies and communication and public relations, among others.
Download or read book The Rhetorical Invention of America s National Security State written by Marouf Hasian and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2015-07-29 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Rhetorical Invention of America’s National Security State examines the rhetoric and discourse produced by and constitutive of America’s national security state. Hasian, Lawson, and McFarlane illustrate the importance of rhetoric to the expansion of the American national security state in the post-9/11 era through their examination of the global war on terrorism, enhanced interrogation techniques, drone crew stress, activities of Edward Snowden, rise of Special Forces, and popular representations of counterterrorism. The coauthors contend this expansion was not the result of lone, imperial executives or a nefarious state within a state, but was co-produced by elite and non-elite Americans alike who not only condoned, but also in many cases demanded, the expansion of the national security state. This work will be of interest to scholars in communication studies and political science.
Download or read book Character in the American Experience written by Bruce Frohnen and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Character in the American Experience: An Unruly People tells the story of the American character, from its earliest beginnings to the present day. Bruce P. Frohnen and Ted V. McAllister detail how great events and daily life have both shaped and been shaped by a people committed to order and independence, community and conflict, as well as the triumphs and tragedies American unruliness produced"--
Download or read book Untangling Self written by Andrew Olendzki and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-12-13 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Untangling Self invites us to see nonself, interdependence, and mindfulness as rational, real-world solutions to the human condition of suffering. In psychologically rich essays that equally probe traditional Buddhist thought and contemporary issues, Andrew Olendzki helps us to reconcile ancient Buddhist thought with our day-to-day life. His writing is sophisticated and engaged, filled with memorable imagery and insight drawn from decades of study, reflection, and meditation on Buddhist teachings. Seasoned Buddhist readers and anyone interested in the intellectual heart of Buddhism will find this collection of fascinating essays rewarding.
Download or read book Viruses Pandemics and Immunity written by Arup K. Chakraborty and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2021-02-16 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How viruses emerge to cause pandemics, how our immune system combats them, and how diagnostic tests, vaccines, and antiviral therapies work. Throughout history, humans have contended with pandemics. History is replete with references to plagues, pestilence, and contagion, but the devastation wrought by pandemics had been largely forgotten by the twenty-first century. Now, the enormous human and economic toll of the rapidly spreading COVID-19 disease offers a vivid reminder that infectious disease pandemics are one of the greatest existential threats to humanity. This book provides an accessible explanation of how viruses emerge to cause pandemics, how our immune system combats them, and how diagnostic tests, vaccines, and antiviral therapies work-- concepts that are a foundation for our public health policies.
Download or read book Four Threats written by Suzanne Mettler and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2020-08-11 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An urgent, historically-grounded take on the four major factors that undermine American democracy, and what we can do to address them. While many Americans despair of the current state of U.S. politics, most assume that our system of government and democracy itself are invulnerable to decay. Yet when we examine the past, we find that the United States has undergone repeated crises of democracy, from the earliest days of the republic to the present. In Four Threats, Suzanne Mettler and Robert C. Lieberman explore five moments in history when democracy in the U.S. was under siege: the 1790s, the Civil War, the Gilded Age, the Depression, and Watergate. These episodes risked profound—even fatal—damage to the American democratic experiment. From this history, four distinct characteristics of disruption emerge. Political polarization, racism and nativism, economic inequality, and excessive executive power—alone or in combination—have threatened the survival of the republic, but it has survived—so far. What is unique, and alarming, about the present moment in American politics is that all four conditions exist. This convergence marks the contemporary era as a grave moment for democracy. But history provides a valuable repository from which we can draw lessons about how democracy was eventually strengthened—or weakened—in the past. By revisiting how earlier generations of Americans faced threats to the principles enshrined in the Constitution, we can see the promise and the peril that have led us to today and chart a path toward repairing our civic fabric and renewing democracy.
Download or read book Fault Lines The New Updated Edition written by Don Liebich and published by Elevate Publishing. This book was released on 2016-05-24 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A clear explanation of American Middle East policy This updated version of Fault Lines is written for those interested in understanding the often convoluted history of American Middle East policy. By enumerating the actors, conflicts, actions and consequences that have shaped American policy in the region, Liebich succeeds in clarifying for his readers the most important factors in a very complicated chain of events. The main takeaway is a general picture of the "fault lines" that have often plagued U.S. efforts to protect its national interests in the region and how these ongoing faults have led to a precipitous decline in American influence. The author makes recommendations as to how this decline can be reversed.
Download or read book The Transformation of the Organization of American States written by Betty Horwitz and published by Anthem Press. This book was released on 2011-10 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the extent and significance of the transformation of the Organisation of American States since 1991: its roots, the reasons for and extent of its emergence, and the role that the organisation currently plays in the promotion of regional governance in the two key issue-areas of security and the defense and promotion of democratic norms and principles of good governance. By assessing where the OAS has succeeded and failed, Horwitz provides an in-depth explanation of how cooperation and consensus works in the Inter-American system.
